28 quotes
Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
It is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system does not want men. They are not safe.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
When the sciences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of causality.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
We do not behave as if we believed that the affairs of our world were significant enough for the intervention of great men.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
We do not need to be able to say what “human nature” is in order to be able to say that some training is “against human nature.”
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
It is hard to grow up in a society in which one’s important problems are treated as nonexistent. It is impossible to belong to it, it is hard to fight to change it.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
Where there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
Their religion is unfeasible, for one cannot richly meet the glancing present … without long discipleship and secure sustenance.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
Few great men could pass personnel.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
Let me formulate the artistic disposition as follows: it is reacting with one’s ideal to the flaw in oneself and in the world, and somehow making that reaction formation solid enough in the medium so that it indeed becomes an improved bit of real world for others.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
The irony is that in our decades, the combination of rationalism, asceticism, and individualism (the so-called Protestant Ethic) has produced precisely the system of boondoggling, luxury-consumption, and status.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
Because of their historical theory of the “alienation of labor” (that the worker must become less and less in control of the work of his hands) the Marxist parties never fought for the man-worthy job itself.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
The ancient dream of man to fly among the stars and go through the could and look down on the lands and seas has degenerated in its realization to the socialized and apathetic behavior of passengers who hardly look out the windows.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
We live increasingly in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, the procedure, prestige, and profit.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race, … it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One’s own products are likely to be personal or parochial.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
The aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to re-establish “belonging,” although this kind of speech and thought is precisely calculated to avoid contact and so makes belonging impossible.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
A well-known magazine asks a man how they should refer to him, as Psychologist X, as Author X? He suggests man of letters, for that is what he is, in the eighteenth-century meaning. But they can’t buy that because the word doesn’t exist in Time-style; he cannot be that, and presumably the old function of letters cannot exist.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)
Nothing could be more stupid than for the communications commission to give to people who handle the means of broadcasting the inventing of what to broadcast, and then, disturbed at the poor quality, to worry about censorship.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)